Bad things happen quickly; good things take time. This isn’t a perfect pattern, of course, but I think it’s real and worth thinking about. A wildfire, explosion, earthquake, pandemic, gunshot, car crash, heart attack—all fast. Cancer typically starts out slow but then gets fast. Climate change seems slow, but the reason it’s so dangerous is […]
Geology
Last week my family traveled to Oregon for an end-of-summer trip. We wanted to start in Bend, in the central part of the state. There we would hike and explore a bit—somewhat to her dismay, I was especially eager to take my daughter up South Sister, one of the Three Sisters volcanoes—before driving down to […]
A couple of weeks ago, I climbed Mount Adams with my good friend Carson. Our plan had been to climb Mount Hood, but schedules being what they were we could only get away from Friday to Saturday. Weekends on Hood can be pretty crowded, so Mount Adams was something of a fallback. A consolation prize. […]
Going into nature, how long does it take till you feel like you’re there? There meaning not sending emails in your head and not wincing at shifts of temperature or humidity when sun turns to rain? There’s a comfort that comes over you. Hands and the heart are no longer so far apart and pulling […]
My preschooler is awed by many things, some of them more generally relatable than others. A spider in the sliding-door track. Mist coming through the woods. Irish butter. And rocks. For a long while now, her favorite miracles have been rocks. She doesn’t anthropomorphize them, turn them into pets, or expect unreasonable things from them. […]
Decades ago when I was hoping to become a scientist, I got a master’s degree dealing with the actions of water in the desert, part of which was studying the hydrology of flash floods on unvegetated bedrock. One term for the result is a “slot canyon.” When people died in a flash flood in a […]
The first time I landed on the Siple Coast of West Antarctica, I immediately felt disoriented. The landscape was a monotonous flat white, with wind-scoured snow and ice extending to identical horizons in every direction. In this isolated spot 380 miles from the South Pole, the only point of reference was the pile of bags […]
